Chris Dodd’s Irish Cottage

The Senate Ethics Committee has been looking into possible conflicts of interest in Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd’s 2003 mortgages. Now questions about another Dodd real-estate adventure, this one in Ireland, should keep the Ethicists even busier. All the more because Mr. Dodd’s “cottage” purchase involves a crooked stock trader for whom the Senator once did a very big political favor.

Mr. Dodd is already under a cloud for receiving what a former loan officer claims was preferential treatment from Countrywide Financial on two mortgage refinancings — in Connecticut and Washington — in 2003. Countrywide was an aggressive lender to shaky borrowers and relied heavily on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy those mortgages in bulk. As a senior Member of the Senate Banking Committee, Mr. Dodd was one of Fannie’s greatest promoters. Mr. Dodd promised last year to disclose mortgage documents to prove he got no special treatment, but so far all he’s done is let a few hand-picked journalists take a quick peek before he put the papers back in storage.

Now enterprising Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie has uncovered another suspicious real-estate investment. The story starts in 1994, when the Senator became one-third owner of a 10-acre estate, then valued at $160,000, on the island of Inishnee on Galway Bay. The property is near the fashionable village of Roundstone, a well-known celebrity haunt. William Kessinger bought the other two-thirds share in the estate. Edward Downe, Jr., who has been a business partner of Mr. Kessinger, signed the deed as a witness. Senator Dodd and Mr. Downe are long-time friends, and in 1986 they had purchased a condominium together in Washington, D.C.

And the hits just keep coming, Chris Dodd is fast becoming the poster boy for everything that’s wrong with Washington, if he had any sense of shame he’d resign.